I will look at adding a few more flowers, trees and shrubs.
I have been very hesitant to add this because the next version of Plangarden will allow you to add your own types of items (flowers,trees,shrubs) along with the ability to upload and use your own icons. This way you can customize Plangarden to you gardening needs and make it just right for you.

This version has some big changes, so it is taking a while to build. and flowers are the biggest request that I have from people that plant flowers as companions to their vegetables.

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solady,
You are welcome to use Plangarden to help with your landscaping of the front yard, and this may work for you.
But Plangarden is not designed as a landscaping tool. There are many software programs out there that specialize in landscaping and will give you a 3d image as to what your front yard will look like when done (not just an overhead 2d view of your garden).

Plangarden was created because even with all the landscaping software out there, there was no software that was truely for vegetable gardeners. I don't have a recomendation for good landscaping software as I have not used or compared packages head-to-head. Maybe others on the forum have and can give you advice.

Ok, suppose you did allow for the uploading of icons to use within Plangarden. Where would we users acquire these icons? We use software written by others because we don't have the expertise and/or time to write our own. I'm sure there are probably some gardeners out there who could create their own icons from scratch but I'm not one of them and I suspect there are more who can't than there are who can. Perhaps you could create or acquire distribution rights to a utility that could generate icons from images. From the user's perspective this would preferably be at no additional cost, but realistically we have to expect an enhanced version to cost more.

It seems reasonable to me for users of a product named Plangarden to want the program to include flowers. After all, the name is Plangarden, not Planvegetablegarden or something equally specific. Granted, your original goal was to fill a void and from what I've seen so far you've gotten off to a good start. Enhancing the program to include a greater variety of flowers would not only accommodate people who want to plan for flowers as well as vegetables but also those who would like to plan for flowers only, increasing the potential market for your program and just possibly your bottom line as well.

I get your message loud and clear. And I do greatly appreciate feedback!!!

As to contributors vs users. Even websites like youtube or flickr rely on a very small percentage of contributors and a rest benefit from the usage.
Yes, I do plan to provide icons, I have a few sources to license icons when needed.

Yes I will do more for gardeners, but probably never fully satisfy people that want landscaping software with 3d views. But I do work hard to make the users of Plangarden as happy as I can.

Oh! If icons uploaded by individuals were made available to all users, that would be cool. I guess I just assumed that such icons would be for personal use only.

While I can understand the desire for a 3-D representation I can certainly live without it. I don't see how you could add that without having to raise the price considrably and inexpensive is one of my determining factors, I'm afraid.

Thanks for the quick response and willingness to help, by the way. Ok, first let me say that I'm relatively new to gardening. I was raised on a farm as a kid but I was no farmer then and am not now at age 58. I tried some container gardening on a second floor deck for a few years with mixed success after I moved back to central PA seven years ago. I moved into town, a small one, about a year and a half ago. The back yard is 23 feet wide by 63 feet long at the extreme. Over the next several years I plan several improvements including a vegetable bed, several flower beds, a patio, an arbor over a glider, a trellis or two and a flowering hedge along the longest stretch of chain-link fence. I've already put in, and populated, a raised perennial bed surrounded by retaining wall block this year and the vegetable bed goes in by the end of the month.

What kind of flowers? Gosh, grab a catalog and plug them all in. Seriously, this year I'm doing perennials, mostly. Possibly this year and for sure next year, I'll be adding a variety of annuals. The bed I already put in has Tall Phlox, Manarda, a Daylily, Astilbe and Carnations. I put some lilies in a treebox that I rebuilt last year to augment the daylilies that were already there. At a minimum I want to try varieties of Lobelia, Columbine, Trandescantia, and Verbascum next year. There's still hope that I'll get some annuals planted this year too. A bed containing five different sunflowers is deffinite and a stretehed octagon shaped bed for butterfly and hummingbird attractors might make it this year as well. The annuals I want to try over the next few years are varieties of Coleus, Perilla, Convolvulus, Coreopsis, Celosia, Geranium, Ipomopsis, Marigold (which you already have), Morning Glory, Pansy (you also have), Petunia, and Viola. I eventually will try some other purely foliage plants and ornamental grasses. Of course, this may change at my very next whim. Naturally I'm interested in plants that will do well in Zone 5b but maybe plugging in that catalog isn't such a bad idea after all.

I see my garden growing and evolving over time. I may not know what I want until I have it growing in front of me. Your program will help me with overall placement but orientation isn't yet optimum. It would be extremely helpful if the ability to rotate objects were added. Like you said, we users are never satisfied.

Last edited by clchilcote on Wed May 16, 2007 9:03 pm; edited 1 time in total

I've been thinking and I would be happy enough with generic flower icons in different basic flower colors. It's way too much to ask for separate icons for each flower type or even shape. I'd be totally satisfied with a red flower icon and a blue flower icon and the same basic icon for yellow, orange, white, purple, pink, a pale green and if possible one for mixed colors. We can then change the names to whatever we're planting. Thanks.

I checked and I have a set of flowers that I have been holding back and hoping to add with the database version, but this is a big change and is taking a while to finish. I have chosen to do a big change rather than a series of small changes, thus I will plug in the flowers I have soon and you will have a nice batch to choose from ... of course it will never be enough or all the right ones, but it will help in solving this problem.

I have herbs clumped into on group called herb. For at least now I will keep them that way until the next release because that will over-crowd the vegetable selector and make the software less usable. In the next version you will be able to select what type of plants to use in the selector and even which varieties from a list of 5000+ vegetable varieties. ....And yes I will look for a flower database to compliment that on the flower side, but after the database release.

I have though of rotating items and it is on my list. It goes with putting on a compas rose and rotating that. I will hold off a little on this, but I do like it as an idea... Then I am sure people will want to rotate the text.. and that you will have to wait a long time for

Please keep the suggestions pouring in. Just like pouring rain, some people may complain about it, but me, I know it help the program grow and I am all for pouring in suggestions.

Yes, rotating text would be nice but I'd be happy if I could just change the size of the text

Coming up with ideas is the easy part. Figuring out how to implement them, whether the effort is worth the bother, and prioritizing the work, those are the hard parts, your parts. As for the suggestions pouring in like rain, well, please bear in mind that it doesn't rain here every day, sometimes not even every week.

Oh, wait, is that a little drizzle I feel? How about more color options in the Layout Editor and the Plant Information box?

When this comes out this should make it much easier to plan. I Hope that when it does come out that it would give you a visual on what it could look like. I also would like a spot to put concerning pests so when you plot out your area that your not feeding the pest..............DEER, RABBITS etc. or if there is not enough light for that plant. Even suggesting layouts that you can modify

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